Chapter Text
Breaking Herbert out of prison is easier than Dan had thought it would be. When the idea first crossed his mind, he’d imagined that it would take a team of highly skilled criminal masterminds all working together, like something out of Ocean’s Eleven . Instead, all it takes are a few of the right words to the wrong people during a visiting day to start a full-scale riot, and that is all the distraction needed.
He’s turning out of the prison parking lot when he hears the first blare of sirens behind him. He just hopes that Herbert will recognize the opportunity for what it is—he must have thought about it, how he’d escape, right? He must know this is the best chance he’ll ever have, unless Dan can get that one lawyer to call him back and can scrape together the money for an appeal. Herbert wouldn’t know about the lawyer, anyway—he sends all of Dan’s letters back to him, unopened.
Dan loops the prison slowly, careful to avoid any residential streets and nosy neighbors, keeping an eye out for police cars speeding to or from the prison. He eventually finds Herbert stumbling out of the woods a ways down a back road—a local lovers’ lane, Dan thinks wryly. Appropriate.
“Get in before you give some poor teenager the fright of their life,” Dan says. The first words he’s spoken to Herbert in over a decade.
Herbert stares up at him in shock. “You’re…”
“Get in , Herbert.”
Herbert hesitates for a long moment. Dan is about to try to reason with him, to explain that however mad he is at Dan surely a ride across state lines would be better than going back to prison, but Herbert seems to arrive at the same conclusion, because he nods shortly and climbs into the car. He doesn’t say anything else, just stares out the front windshield as Dan hits the gas.
“I figured we should try to get at least into New York before tonight,” Dan says to fill the silence. “They’ll be looking harder for you here.”
Herbert doesn’t respond.
“I live in Illinois now—Daniel Cain does, anyway. Ethan Morse has a house in the Berkshires and visits Kurt Horning at Arkham Prison every other Sunday.”
Dan passes over the fake I.D. Herbert accepts it wordlessly, peering at the terrible photo. The silence drags on. Dan switches on the radio. The local oldies station is in the middle of some Boston song that he faintly remembers Meg liking, lifetimes ago. He switches it off again.
Finally, Herbert clears his throat and says, “this I.D. card—they put holograms on them now.”
“I know,” Dan says. “I would’ve had to get a new one in a month. I have the paperwork for it—Ethan pays all his utility bills. Taxes, too.”
“Who’s Kurt Horning?”
Dan listens hopefully for a note of jealousy in the question, but Herbert’s tone is carefully neutral. At least he’s speaking to Dan. “Assault and manslaughter—too many bar fights, one of them went wrong.” He waits for Herbert to ask why he had sought out a prison thug, but he never does. “He started the riot today,” he says, hoping Herbert will understand.
Herbert sighs loudly and leans his cheek against the window. “I had been working productively in solitary. My notes—I was only able to save a few pages.”
Dan had known that Herbert was still angry—the years of unopened letters had told him that—but he had been hoping that his efforts as Ethan would at least thaw him out a little. Apparently not.
“I have all your old notes,” he offers. “Everything I could salvage.”
“This was different. New breakthroughs.”
“Breakthroughs?”
Herbert glares at him. “I’m not telling you any of this, Daniel.”
“Right. Okay. You don’t have to tell me anything.” They’ve reached the end of the road, where it intersects with Route 2. Dan stops, puts on his turn signal—west, toward Albany. “Only—you will come with me, right? To Illinois?”
“Can I leave, once we get there?”
“Dammit, Herbert, do you think I’m going to lock you in?” Dan closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Steadies himself. Unclenches his hands from the wheel. “You can leave if you want. Just give me a chance, okay? To show you?”
Herbert doesn’t speak again, but at least he doesn’t refuse. Dan is going to take it as a maybe .
*
They stop at a motel about an hour west of Albany, a few miles off the highway. The ‘vacancy’ sign is flickering ominously, and the parking lot is completely empty, except for a scrawny raccoon pawing through a dumpster.
Dan checks them in under Ethan’s name and pays cash. He asks for two beds, to which the desk clerk glances at the parking lot where Herbert is waiting, raises an eyebrow and says, “sure,” far too skeptically for Dan’s liking.
Herbert is back to pointedly ignoring Dan. As soon as Dan gets the door unlocked, he stalks across the room, sits down at the little corner desk, and starts scribbling on the tiny motel notepad, faster than Dan has ever seen him write before. He’s probably trying to recapture everything lost in prison.
It’s striking, how much older he looks. Dan hadn’t been fully prepared to see the creases around his eyes, or the touch of gray in his hair—an unpleasant reminder of all the time they have lost. Dan wants to apologize, but what can he possibly say after so long?
“I’ve done more tests too,” Dan says eventually. The only kind of apology that he thinks Herbert will understand. “You can look through my notes, when we get home? See if there’s anything valuable in there?”
Herbert hmm s skeptically, still writing frantically.
“You don’t need to include me,” he adds. “I can just give you the notes. Leave you to work through them alone. Just in case… in case they might help you.”
“Do you think they might help me?”
“One woman lasted a whole week,” Dan says. She had been responsive for most of that time, talking to him about her grandchildren and her childhood and what a good, sweet boy he was, but by the end she had screamed for death. Just like all the others.
Herbert’s pen stops suddenly, and Dan can tell he has to force himself not to look too interested. “You’re using human subjects again.”
“I have keys to the morgue.”
“You have keys to the morgue.”
“I, uh. I dated one of the cleaning ladies,” Dan explains, though his night with Lydia had hardly counted as dating . “Got her keys copied.”
Herbert almost smiles at that—Dan catches the way the corner of his mouth twitches. “That sounds like you.”
“We broke up,” Dan adds quickly.“Or weren’t really even together, actually. There isn’t—I don’t have a girlfriend. Or anyone.”
Herbert raises an eyebrow. “Okay.”
“I spend most of my nights in the basement, actually,” he says.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find some new distraction soon enough.”
There’s the note of jealousy Dan had been hoping for. “Maybe I will,” he says, shrugging, as if it’s no concern to him how Herbert’s jaw was clenching and unclenching.
“If you want me to stay, you can’t bring your-—your floozies anywhere near me,” Herbert says. He looks flustered, almost anxious. He’s tapping the pen against the pad erratically enough that Dan worries he might have to recopy the notes a second time.
Dan doesn’t bother to point out that the term ‘floozy’ went out of fashion sometime before Herbert was born and that, anyway, it’s still an awful way to talk about women. He doesn’t even add that there have been more men than women lately—Herbert will find that out soon enough, if he does stay.
“I’ll keep my dating life strictly out of the basement.”
Herbert looks confused for a moment, as if he wants to say more but he can’t decide what. Finally, he gives Dan a jerky nod and says, “Fine, yes. That will be acceptable.”
Dan grins at him. “So you’ll stay?”
“I never said that.” Herbert glances down at his notes and then back up at Dan, frowning. “You have morgue access and space for me to work?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll leave me to work, undisturbed?”
“You’ll never even know that I’m there,” Dan promises.
*
Dan isn’t sure if Herbert sleeps at all—he’s still hunched over the desk when Dan falls asleep and is in the exact same place when Dan wakes up, a little stack of motel notepads piled in front of him. The only sign that he has moved at all is a cup of coffee sitting on the desk, and another on the bedside table beside Dan.
Dan takes a sip of the coffee and smiles to himself. All these years in prison, and Herbert still remembered the sugar.
*
They stop at a gas station with a pay phone. Dan dials his voicemail to listen to the very concerned warden at Arkham inform him that Herbert West has escaped and might be motivated to seek revenge. Dan wonders what the warden would say if he knew the full extent of Herbert’s ‘revenge’ was refusing to tell Dan any of his newest discoveries. He also wonders what the warden would say if he knew that Dan would have preferred Herbert to come after him with a knife.
He sighs and dials the return number. When the warden picks up, Dan puts on his best concerned voice.
“I’m in New York on business,” he says. “Won’t be back home till Thursday. Will that be safe?”
The warden tells him that they’ve been in touch with the Oak Hills police department, and that they’ll be on the lookout for anyone matching West’s description. “If you give them the go-ahead,” the warden adds, “they can probably send someone down to search the house.”
“I’ll do that,” Dan agrees, looking at Herbert. He’s sipping his second cup of gas station coffee with an expression of intense distaste. “Do you really think Herbert West could be dangerous? I mean—he wasn’t exactly the biggest guy, and he mostly only ever cared about his work.”
“To you, Dr. Cain? I believe he could be very dangerous.”
*
By Thursday, Dan has spoken with an overeager officer from the Oak Hills PD, who assures Dan that they’ve been over his house with a fine-toothed comb and found no sign of Herbert West, or any other hidden fugitive for that matter. Dan doesn’t even have to pretend to be relieved—how would have reacted if he had found the basement stacked high with Herbert’s research and supplies, and some of the remains of Dan’s latest experiment not quite tidied away?
Then again, he would have had to have found the basement first.
Much to Herbert’s annoyance, Dan makes him crouch in the back of the car under an old blanket and Dan’s suitcase for the final approach to Dan’s street.
“My legs don’t fit,” he complains loudly. Probably just to show Dan that he’s not forgiven—Dan doesn’t remember him ever complaining about anywhere they’d had to hide back in the day.
“I know for a fact a taller body than yours fits back there just fine,” Dan retorts. “Be quiet , or Mrs. Morrison will think I’m talking to myself.”
Dan unloads his suitcase first and waits by the window, watching nosy old Mrs. Morrison chatting to one of the Fletcher boys. She waves at him and he smiles and waved back, hoping against hope she won’t decide it’s a good time for a neighborly visit.
It’s his lucky day, apparently, because Mrs. Morrison’s horrible little dog starts yapping and pulling at its leash and she immediately forgets about Dan in her concern over what could possibly be troubling her perfect precious little girl.
Dan waits another minute to be sure, and then goes back to the car for Herbert. It’s surreal, after months of planning and imagining, to finally be standing here on the threshold of it all. He’s having trouble believing it all worked out so well—he keeps expecting to hear sirens in the distance, but the only sound he can make out is Mrs. Morrison’s little dog still yapping inside the house. It feels like this should all be happening on a dark and stormy night, not on a quiet suburban street in the crisp autumn sunlight.
He takes a deep breath and lets Herbert into the house.
*
Herbert examines Dan’s living room— their living room now, if Dan has his way—with the same curiosity he would bring to his research. Dan catches a spark of hunger as he skims the bookshelves and spots some of the more obscure texts Dan has gotten his hands on.
“Impressive,” he admits, fingers brushing against the spine of Pitr Gideon’s monograph on neural decomposition. “He’s well known as a quack, of course, but even so… I’m surprised you could track down a copy.”
“You mentioned it,” Dan says. “It’s in your notes, that you hoped to read it in full at some point”
Herbert nods. “Quack or not, Gideon’s theories were foundational to much of Gruber’s early work.”
“Do you…” miss him , Dan wants to ask, but that suddenly seems to be crossing a line. Herbert never talked much about Gruber—his work, sure, but never a hint as to their personal relationship. Dan had never cared enough to pry, but now he desperately wants to know if Herbert is even capable of mourning.
Not right now, though. Not when Herbert is smiling at the books Dan bought for him, and it feels like there is a real possibility he’ll stay, at least long enough to read through a few of them.
Dan clears his throat. “Do you want to see the basement?”
Herbert is still doing his best to play indifferent, but Dan spots the light in his eyes and the way his fingers twitch at the word. “Very well.”
Dan leads him through the kitchen and into the pantry, fumbling for the light switch. “It’s a false wall, see?” He presses the latch, and the back wall swings forward.
“It’s entirely soundproof,” Dan continues as they make their way down the stairs. He knocks against the foam walls to demonstrate. “I did it all myself—I couldn’t get a contractor to do any of this, of course. I mean, can you imagine that? He would have thought I was a serial killer.”
“Or a sexual pervert,” Herbert adds.
Dan nearly trips. He absolutely cannot fixate on Herbert West saying the word ‘sexual’ or having ideas about sexual things Dan could be getting up to in a soundproof basement or his brain will short-circuit and Herbert will have him as his next test subject.
“Something on your mind, Daniel?” If Dan didn’t know better, he’d swear Herbert sounds almost flirtatious, but when he turns around, Herbert is paying Dan no attention, instead focused intently on the mechanism of the false wall.
Dan flips on the basement light. “All the power down here runs on that generator in the back, so it’s off the main grid. And you should have all the equipment you need—it’s worked for me so far, anyway. If there’s anything else, though, I could probably get it from the hospital.”
Herbert makes his way downstairs into the lab and begins to examine the cabinets with the same degree of care he had given to the bookshelves upstairs. When he opens the cold storage and catches sight of what Dan’s keeping inside, his eyes widen.
“I thought you hated this kind of thing,” he says, holding up Dan’s failed attempt at a patchwork dog. “What exactly is—this bit?”
Dan winces. “I was trying to see if it could survive longer if I replaced the organs with those of a younger dog,” he explains. It emphatically had not. “It was a mistake I won’t make a second time.”
Herbert prods the tail with one finger, frowning, and then drops the dog back into the freezer. “But the human subjects—they will be fresher than this, correct?”
“It’s a short enough drive. You can do it in six minutes if you hit the light on Wakefield when it’s green.”
“Six minutes is a long time. Longer if that one very talkative neighbor of yours is around.”
“I’ve managed,” Dan says. “Give it a chance at least, okay? I’ll keep an eye out for anywhere closer.”
Herbert looks surprised by the offer. “I haven’t agreed to any of this,” he says sharply. “Don’t buy a new house for me. That would be a waste of your money. I’ll probably be gone by the end of next week.”
“Please.”
Dan’s voice cracks on the word. Herbert must notice it too, because his expression softens slightly and he inclines his head. “I’m not promising anything,” he says. “But if you leave me to my work and accompany me to your morgue when I see fit, then perhaps this arrangement could be workable.”
*
Over the following week, Dan barely sees Herbert. He can’t tell if he’s deliberately avoiding him—even at the best of times, Herbert had always skipped meals and sleep in favor of his work, but Dan would occasionally run into him making coffee or else hear him in the shower. Now, the house seems even more silent than it had been when Dan lived alone, as if Herbert is somehow dampening all the sound simply with his presence.
Dan would check on him, but he’s worried that the slightest disturbance will spook Herbert and send him running away forever. And so he leaves the basement alone and communicates with Herbert solely by sticky notes, which he sticks to the door of the hallway bathroom.
Do you need anything? He writes the first night.
Herbert apparently doesn’t, because Dan wakes up to find the yellow square crumpled up in the trash.
The next night, Dan copies down his work schedule for the week and adds in case you need me . Herbert seems to appreciate the necessity for the schedule at least, because it’s pinned to the fridge when Dan wakes up. Under ‘ in case you need me ,’ Herbert has added, I won’t .
I’m sorry , Dan writes the next night. It’s easier in writing. He knows how to write it—he had included it in every letter Herbert never read, dozens of apologies that had amounted to nothing but practice.
Herbert can’t send the note back unopened this time at least, so Dan knows he must have seen it. He leaves it untouched on the door, so Dan does too, a testament to everything that has passed between them. Underneath it, he writes, what do you want for dinner?
The apology note seems to have had some effect, or else Herbert is just hungry enough not to care, because Dan wakes up to find a list of Chinese food written out in Herbert’s neat script. Dan smiles to himself; unless Herbert’s tastes have changed dramatically in prison, he added an order of crab rangoon for Dan. Dan wonders if it was thoughtful or reflexive—he’s not sure which he prefers, Herbert having cared enough to include Dan’s order, or Dan being so much a part of his life, even now, that Herbert can’t help but include him.
He picks up the food on the way home from his shift and is pleased to find Herbert waiting for him at the kitchen table, reading one of the newer neuroscience books Dan had bought him. He keeps frowning and crossing things out with a red pen.
“That book cost over a hundred dollars,” Dan says.
Herbert glances up. “Were you planning to resell it?”
“No.”
“Then what does it matter?” He crosses out another sentence, his brow furrowed. “It’s complete garbage anyway. Dr. Gruber disproved most of this over two decades ago.”
Dan leans over to see what exactly has offended Herbert to such an extent, but he snaps the book shut and glares at Dan. “This is part of my work,” he snaps. “That means you can’t look at it.”
It’s my book , Dan wants to say, but it would be a waste of time to pretend that he hadn’t always intended the books as a gift for Herbert. Instead, he holds up the takeout bag. “Will you eat, at least?”
“I am here, am I not?”
Herbert doesn’t talk much over dinner. He used to monologue throughout their meals, practically forgetting to eat in his excitement over a new theory, flapping his hands wildly when Dan failed to immediately grasp the implications of the regenerative properties of a certain lobster or whatever else he was on about. Now, Herbert simply prods his broccoli critically while ignoring all of Dan’s attempts at conversation.
“Want to watch a movie?” Dan asks when Herbert has scooped up the last of his food. “I have some DVDs upstairs if you want to take a look?”
Herbert looks unimpressed. “Is this how you get women into your bedroom?”
Dan can feel himself flushing. He hadn’t meant it that way, but he has used the line on more than one date in the past. Not only for sexual reasons either—as soon as he started collecting the books, he had hated having anyone else in the living room. He always felt exposed, like one of them would spot the name Gruber on the highest shelf and recognize how pathetic Dan had become.
“You can just say no,” he tells Herbert.
“Fine, I’ll watch a movie,” Herbert says. “There’s nothing else I can do in the basement tonight, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“ Cain ,” Herbert snaps. “Stop asking, I’m not going to tell you about the work.”
The surname hurts more than Daniel , and the refusal hurts more than either. Dan wonders if he will ever be able to regain Herbert’s trust, or if it will just be like this for the rest of their lives, with Herbert avoiding him and Dan locked out of his own basement.
Dan is about to lead Herbert upstairs and drop the subject for now, but he has never been able to leave well enough alone when it comes to Herbert. That’s why they’re here in the first place, why Dan wound up risking his career for a second time trying to help a man who seemed to hate him.
“Did you read my notes?” he asks.
Herbert glares at him. It’s a good look for him. “Daniel, you are no longer a part of my work. You made that clear when you sent me to prison .”
“And here you are,” Dan protests. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“I was perfectly happy in solitary. I was finally getting work done free from your distractions.”
“Oh yeah? Lots of fresh bodies for you to work with?”
“The rats were fine.” Herbert takes off his glasses and begins cleaning them on his shirt. “Besides, I didn’t have to worry all the time about whether you’d change your mind and turn me in.”
“You worry about that?” Dan asks. He wants to reassure Herbert that he’s here and he’s sorry and he’s trustworthy, but why should Herbert believe him? Facts are safer. More trustworthy. He puts a hand on Herbert’s shoulder. “I lied to the police for you. If I turned you in now, I’d only be fucking myself over. Besides, why would I go through all this work only to turn around and send you back to prison?”
Herbert rolls his eyes. “I don’t know, Daniel, you tell me. Why would you turn me in, betray everything we worked on together, only to break me out again?”
Dan opens his mouth to speak—he doesn’t know how to explain it, not exactly, but he has to start somewhere —but Herbert shoves Dan’s hand off his shoulder and squeezes past him.
“I’ve changed my mind. I’m not in the mood for a movie tonight.”
*
They carry on like that throughout the next weeks. Herbert gets up before Dan—or simply doesn’t sleep, Dan can’t tell the difference. Sometimes, Herbert leaves a note with a food order, but more often he leaves Dan absolutely no sign of his existence. The ‘end of next week’—Herbert’s theoretical departure date—comes and passes without incident. Dan wakes the following Monday with his heart pounding, suddenly terrified that Herbert made good on his threat and that the house will be empty again. He rushes downstairs, imagining the basement emptied and the bookshelves in disarray, but the stack of defaced books is still sitting on the kitchen table and the bathroom door says, pizza (half pepperoni) .
Dan snatches down the note and clutches it to his chest, laughing out of sheer relief.
A few days later, Herbert asks for a few medical supplies with the words NO QUESTIONS added below, underlined twice. Dan wonders how he expects him to get his hands on three class B narcotics and a very specialized piece of equipment before the next day without being fired or arrested, but Herbert never was all that focused on the practicality of his demands.
Dan spends his lunch break stealing from the hospital. He’s a bit concerned how good he’s gotten at it.
The next morning, Herbert hasn’t written anything else, but there’s a cup of coffee waiting on the kitchen table, black with two spoonfuls of sugar.
They eat together most nights after that, Dan gently trying to steer the conversation towards Herbert’s work while Herbert emphatically shuts him down every time. They don’t have much else to talk about—Dan will sometimes tell stories from the hospital, but Herbert either cuts in to criticize the other doctors’ decisions or to ask Dan snarkily if the female patients were good-looking. Dan generally gives up and eats in silence after that.
*
Herbert has been doing who-knows-what in the basement for over two weeks when he finally comes to Dan late one night, four hours before Dan’s alarm is set to go off, pounding on Dan’s door like it’s a matter of life or death.
Dan stumbles out of bed to open it. Two hours ago he probably would have punched the air knowing Herbert would deign to come up to him, but now he really just wants to squeeze in a few hours of sleep. “Yes?”
Herbert glances critically at his bare chest. “You still sleep like that.”
“I wasn’t exactly dressed expecting you to come banging on my door.”
“I need to go to the morgue,” Herbert announces. “You have to drive me.”
“Herbert, it’s past two in the morning.”
“And? Should we wait to steal corpses during business hours?” Herbert’s voice is sharp, but his eyes keep flicking down to Dan’s bare chest. “Would you please put some clothes on?”
Dan is tempted to press him on how distracted he seems by Dan’s body, but it’s not worth sending Herbert back into another weeks-long sulk. And besides, knowing Herbert, he’s probably just picturing breaking Dan apart for parts.
Even so, Dan can’t be blamed if he takes longer to find a shirt than is strictly necessary, or if he stands directly in Herbert’s line of sight as he does so. Unfortunately, after his initial discomfort, Herbert seems frustratingly unaffected by the display, just sighing and pointedly checking his watch.
“I’m coming goddammit, calm down.”
“We don’t want to waste the night,” Herbert says. “I’m in the middle of a very delicate experiment, and it will all be ruined if I don’t have a human heart at the very least in the next half hour. Preferably a brain as well.”
“I—Herbert, you’re not—”
“I’ve told you already, you gave up the right to ask about my work when you told the police all there was to know about it last time,” Herbert snaps. “Nothing I do will leave the basement, and that’s all you need to know about it.”
“I didn’t tell the police half of what I knew,” Dan protests. For some reason, the distinction is important to him. “Nothing about the work itself.”
“If that detail helps you sleep at night, you can keep repeating it. It hardly changed my sentence now did it?”
Dan could add that Herbert would hardly have been pleased when suddenly every academic in the field was clamoring for credit for his reagent, but there’s no point. Herbert is clearly determined to drive the knife in deeper, and Dan can’t pretend he doesn’t deserve it, so instead he just says, “I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Herbert makes a little sound, skeptical, but his eyes flick down again as Dan pulls on a pair of jeans, so he takes that as half a win.
Herbert is silent on the drive to the morgue. Dan is starting to hope he might have warmed up a bit, but when they pull into the parking lot, he checks his watch and says, “ Eight minutes,” with a tone of disgust Dan has only ever heard him use about Dr. Hill, back in their student days.
“Does it matter how fast we get here?”
“I told you, Daniel, I’m in the middle of something,” Herbert snipes, grabbing the keys out of his hand. “Are you coming or not?”
“For fuck’s sake, Herbert, will you wait just one second?” Dan calls after him, but he’s already unlocking the back door and Dan has to jog to keep up.
“I can’t ‘wait just one second,’ I am on a deadline .”
Dan sighs and follows him into the building. It’s nice, almost, seeing Herbert this excitable rather than the sullen version of himself that glared at Dan across the dinner table. On the other hand, it’s 3 in the morning and Herbert is dragging him by the sleeve down a hallway that smells overwhelmingly of formaldehyde, and he feels for a moment like it’s 1985 again and they’re back at Miskatonic, before Dan had fully understood the implications of what they were doing. He’s still not sure how he feels about that.
Herbert pauses at the entrance to body storage. “Why here?” he asks suddenly.
“Excuse me?”
“You have access to the hospital’s facilities, presumably?”
“Harder to trace back to us here, though,” Dan explains. “And besides, it’s easier for bodies to go missing here. Paper files disappear all the time. The hospital system is all digital now.”
“Fascinating.”
“What?”
Herbert tilts his head to one side. “Your foresight. That’s a new skill for you.”
“Hey, that’s not fair.”
“Hmm, isn’t it?” Herbert flicks on the light switch. “Now, you know the deal here. We’re looking for anyone that died in the last 24 hours— not a brain injury or a weak heart.”
“And then what are you going to do with them?” Dan asks, but he starts flipping through the nearest stack of files.
Herbert doesn’t answer, just makes his way through the row of bodies, occasionally peering at one or another and clucking his tongue disapprovingly. “Daniel, time is running out.”
“I’m reading this as fast as I can,” Dan snaps, flipping through a few more pages. “Do you want me to get this wrong?”
“I want you to find me what I need in time .”
“Wait—hold on a second.” Dan stops suddenly, halfway through checking the nearest body for cause of death. “I’ve seen you refuse to answer the phone because you were ‘in the middle of a delicate experiment,’ and now you’re just dropping everything to run out for some fresh parts?”
Herbert raises his eyebrows. “So?”
“So, this is bullshit! There’s no way you left that basement in the middle of something. You’d have waited.”
“Like you know me that well.”
“I do know you that well,” Dan retorts, becoming more convinced by the second that he’s right. It helps that Herbert, for all his professed rush, has stopped fumbling with the bodies and is now staring at Dan with his arms folded. “What is this, some kind of fucked up loyalty test?”
“So what if it is?”
Dan should probably yell at him, or storm out and leave him to get back to the house on foot. Instead he asks. “So, did I pass?”
Herbert’s mouth twitches. “You were adequate. B-.”
Dan thinks he’s joking. He can never quite tell. “So, if you’re making all this up then, are we done here?”
Herbert walks over to his side. Dan thinks for a moment that he’s going to reach out, to clutch Dan’s shoulder like he always used to, but instead he pries the stack of files out of Dan’s hand and starts flipping through them himself. “Well, as long as we’re here…”
Which is how Dan finds himself backing his truck into the corner of the parking lot free of cameras while Herbert drags one of the bodies into the trunk. “B- my ass,” Dan grumbles as he helps Herbert shove the man under the tarp. “This has to be at least an A-.”
“B+ maybe if you really can get me back to the lab in the next six minutes,” Herbert replies.
Dan gets there in five.